Alexander Melnikov I

Rachmaninoff? For Alexander Melnikov, he is a composer who still remains underestimated: “We have cobbled together an image of Rachmaninoff that reduces his creative output to a small number of melodic pieces distorted into kitsch.” Melnikov, who has garnered acclaim on the international concert stage as a gifted chamber musician, will be joined by the cellist Alexander Rudin to perform Rachmaninoff’s Sonata for cello and piano in G minor, whose central scherzo evokes dark Romantic fantasies. This is followed by the emotional shadings of the “Six Romances” op. 38 with the much praised lyric soprano Nadezhda Pavlova before another multi award-winner, the pianist Olga Pashchenko, performs two of Rachmaninoff’s song transcriptions for solo piano: “Wohin?” from Schubert’s “Die schöne Müllerin” and Tchaikovsky’s “Lullaby”, which turns into a sleepwalking ghost ride in Rachmaninoff’s version – full of whirring capers and nervous, sparky semiquavers. The evening is rounded off with the “Symphonic Dances,” in which the exiled Rachmaninoff once again recalls the sound of his lost cultural and spiritual home. His own transcription of this orchestral work for two pianos is a brilliant virtuoso achievement, which Alexander Melnikov and Olga Pashchenko present here as a duo.